"meta"

Wed Aug 2 14:04:05 UTC 2006

Here's what I came up with.

I'm still interested in tracing the phrase "that's so meta" -- is it a Buffy
thing?

(To sign up to receive my weekly "On Language" column by e-mail, go to
www.nbierma.com/language.)

Nathan Bierma
Contributing Writer, Chicago Tribune
Adjunct Professor of English, Calvin College

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`Meta'-morphosis: It's everywhere
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By Nathan Bierma
August 2, 2006

Too much meta. That's what Sam McManis wrote earlier this year in the
Sacramento Bee, talking about the just-released movie "Tristram Shandy: A Cock
and Bull Story." The movie is "a movie about making a movie of an 18th Century
comic novel that was about the conventions of novel writing," McManis
explained.

"How very meta it all is," he added.

That's right: "meta." The prefix has now taken its place as a separate word in
the English language.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines "meta" as an adjective that describes
"something that is self-parodying and self-referential in reflecting or
representing the characteristics it alludes to or depicts."

The OED's entry cites a 1993 article in the Boston Globe, which also complained
about meta in pop culture. The Globe said, "When anchorwoman Connie Chung made a
guest appearance on the sitcom `Murphy Brown' to advise anchorwoman Murphy not
to sacrifice her journalistic integrity by making a guest appearance on a
sitcom, that was just plain meta."

Ironically -- or maybe it's meta -- the OED's earliest example of "meta" in
print, a 1988 article in The New Republic magazine, reports that Merriam-Webster
lexicographer David Justice predicted "meta" would become a word.

"He predicts that, like `retro' -- whose use solely as a prefix is so, well,
retro -- `meta' could become independent from other words, as in, `Wow, this
sentence is so meta,'" wrote the New Republic. "If so, you heard it [here]
first."

Nearly two decades later, the prediction has come true. "Meta has become the
new irony these days," McManis observed in the Sacramento Bee. "It's the trendy
-- albeit far from new -- pop-culture device perfect for a navel-gazing,
self-referential populace that wants its entertainment in a continuous loop."

And McManis was writing before the release of the  movies "A Prairie Home
Companion" -- a movie portraying a fictional radio program, based on an actual
radio program -- and "Lady in the Water," which has a character named “Story,”
and features a fictional critic's commentary on some scenes as they are taking
place.

Maybe because we feel inundated by meta, the word often appears today in
phrases such as "too meta" and "so meta." The phrase "so meta it hurts" is a
category at Flickr, the picture-sharing Web site. Many pictures in that category
are pictures of people taking pictures.

I considered writing an article about writing this article, but I thought that
would just be too meta.

History of the word

This usage is a new twist in the millennia-long history of "meta." The word
began in ancient Greek as a preposition meaning "after." The word
"metamorphosis" literally means "after transformation." "Meta" is also buried in
the word "method," which comes from the Greek word "methodos," a compound of
"meta-hodos" -- literally meaning "journey after."

Aristotle's book "Metaphysics" discusses subjects that Aristotle thought should
be taught "after physics" -- after the natural, empirical sciences, such as
philosophical questions about existence.

After "meta" was adopted into Latin, and then into English, the prefix came to
mean "above" or "beyond," possibly because of the heady contents of Aristotle's
"Metaphysics."

"I think that the Greek `meta' was indeed taken and extended [in English],
probably beyond recognition for a native speaker of ancient Greek," says Helma
Dik, a classics professor at the University of Chicago who specializes in Greek
linguistics. "But then, the ancient Greeks stretched prepositions themselves all
the time, so after a quick immersion course in present-day English I'm sure they
would be fine with it."

In the late 20th Century, computers gave "meta" new life. Early computer
keyboards had a Meta key, which controlled the function of other keys (the
equivalent of the Alt key on a Windows computer today, or Command key on a Mac).
Most Web pages include "meta tags" -- hidden lines of code that describe what
the page is about and include key words for search engines to find.

But only in the last decade or so has "meta" become a word of its own. It's
usually used to describe movies about movies, journalism about journalism or Web
logs about Web logs.

Fictional beginnings

This sense of "meta" probably began with the word "metafiction" --
self-referential fiction, which the Oxford English Dictionary traces to 1960.
(The OED and the New Oxford American Dictionary are the only major dictionaries
to include a separate entry for "meta" as a word.)

"`Meta' is . . . creeping more and more into everyday conversations, even if
it's not nearly as widespread as, say, 'irony,'" wrote Laura Miller in the New
York Times book Review in late 2002.

One opponent of the spread of the word "meta" posted a comment anonymously at
the Web site called (what else?) MetaFilter (www.metafilter.com).

"The word [should be] either `circular' or `reflexive' or `redundant' or
`ironic,'" the visitor wrote. "Self-referential isn't remarkable anymore, so
let's not pretend we have to invent a new word for it."

Too late.

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Got a question about asking a question? How meta. Write to Nathan Bierma at
onlanguage at gmail.com.

Copyright (c) 2006, Chicago Tribune

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/chi-0608020134aug02,1,1632630.story

>>> Nathan Bierma 7/19/2006 6:35 PM >>>

Arnold,

My editor asked me to do something on "meta" as a new slang term (evidently
meaning "ironic/self-referential," etc.) I didn't find anything on ASD-L search,
and I don't think I can post a query to the listserv without being subscribed
(which I no longer am, because I couldn't keep up, although I've bookmarked the
weekly archives). Do you mind posting a question on my behalf--and/or your own
comments--to ASD-L?

Note:

last listing at dictionary.com:

Main Entry:   meta
Part of Speech:   noun
Definition:   something with refers to itself, esp. in self-parodying manner
Example:   A movie-within-a-movie is an example of meta.
Etymology:   meta `beyond'

Source: Webster's New Millennium* Dictionary of English, Preview Edition (v
0.9.6)
Copyright © 2003-2005 Lexico Publishing Group, LLC

also see the 1st paragraph
http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/feature/36696/Column_Column_Puritan_Blister_17

also: Google "so meta"
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&rls=GGGL%2CGGGL%3A2006-18%2CGGGL%3Aen&q=%22so+meta%22&btnG=Search

Thanks!

Nathan

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